I spent years with an upper class hunk – watching Disney’s Rivals reminds me why I’m glad I didn’t ‘marry up’, and picked a normal man instead!
My new friend’s grandmother sat down in her armchair, poured a large glass of single malt and leaned in for a ‘chat’.
“Tell me, love,” she said, taking my hand in her gnarled, bejeweled one. “Are you young ladies still riding side saddle these days?”
I almost spit my drink into my glass as my friend laughed in the bookcase. She wasn’t being naughty, she really wanted to be informed about the preferred driving style of women in their twenties as things had ‘changed so much since she was a debutante’. She thought it was a worthy conversation opener with her grandson’s newest crush.
British actor Luke Pasqualino plays Basil Babbingham in the Disney+ series Rivals
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wasn’t riding a sidesaddle, or any saddle for that matter. I’d never really ridden a horse before, unless it counted taking a ten-year-old pony on a camping holiday in Wales. The closest I ever came to horse riding was going to the bookmakers, on behalf of my grandpa, to place a bet.
In the end I just went along with it, for the sport of it: “No, I’m not,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like my own. “Good thing, it looks awfully awkward,” as my friend backed out of the room, doubled over with laughter.
Oh, how I loved ‘Posh Granny’. She always reminded me of the very different world I found myself in during the two years I – a working-class girl from a seedy seaside town in the south of England – dated a member of the Debrett’s list. the aristocracy, early 1990s.
It’s a world some are enjoying with the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s outrageous 1988 ‘bonkbuster’ Rivals, which explores the machinations and pleasures of the wealthy horse set.
Although I never played nude tennis with a Conservative minister, or joined the Mile High Club at Concorde a la Rivals, it was an interesting and fun two years, writes Anonymous.
While I can’t say I ever played naked tennis with a Conservative minister, or joined the Mile High Club at Concorde a la Rivals, it was an interesting, fun two years that eventually ended with us returning to our respective worlds.
He accepted a job abroad, which put us in an impossible position. To join him, I would have to marry him for visa reasons, and I think we both realized that wasn’t something that would work.
But why? These were the so-called glory days of social mobility. Just a year earlier, in 1990, south London high school student John Major had entered Downing Street promising a “classless society.”
Ultimately, though, my ex and I just weren’t compatible. It went way beyond “napkin-no-napkin” niceties; our different backgrounds meant that we were, if not on the same page, on many fundamental issues.
Dating outside the classroom shouldn’t matter, but unfortunately that’s usually always the case – even if no one likes to admit it.
Statistics seem to support how much class is still quietly at the controls in Britain. Those who thought problems with relationship classes were limited to Austen’s time will be surprised to learn that even today people tend to marry their own kind.
Alex Hassel, who plays Rupert Campbell-Black, and Pasqualino in the hit show
A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research found that 45 percent of women born in 1970 married someone from the same social class as them. Thirty-two percent ‘married’ and 23 percent married. A generation later, the initial figure had risen to 56 percent – with only 16 percent ‘moving up’ and 28 percent lowering the bar.
My ex and I had met at work – that great leveler – although he arrived with an expensive education and a cut-glass accent. What attracted us was the good old chemistry. I had never met anyone like him, even though his family only employed people like me.
To be fair, his family was kind to me, although, looking back, it had an unsavory whiff of My Fair Lady. My ex loved going through the do’s and don’ts and expectations of a shooting weekend on the family estate with me.
And his old school friends, all with nicknames like Bilbo, Whiffy or Nobby, regarded me as a passing fancy at best. Once someone even made a shocking passage to me.
My ex’s old school friends, all with nicknames like Bilbo, Whiffy or Nobby, regarded me as a passing fancy at best, writes Anonymous. Once someone even made a shocking passage to me
Their attitude towards women in general raised alarm bells. They didn’t seem to have any friends. Girls were divided into three categories: those they wanted to sleep with, and those they considered marriage material – and the rest were simply invisible. I was definitely category one.
The family had a ski hut in the Alps and spent every Christmas and Easter there. There was a certain lip balm that he used during the journey and when he was taken away to boarding school at the age of seven, it was this comforting lip balm that he would sniff under the covers at night, trying so hard to be a brave boy and not to cry.
He just couldn’t understand my horror at the story.
He thought it was cute, and of course he insisted he do the same with his son (note: son, not daughter). Boarding school, he insisted, would do him justice.
However, his sister was not sent to school, but went to a much cheaper private day school. Again, when I dared to ask why, he simply shrugged and said it was the family way. She was expected to marry well and not have to worry about a career.
A year after we separated, I met my husband: a high school boy with an electrician father and mother who, like me, worked as a nurse. We have been married for 25 years.
I will never regret my time with my Posh Boy. I saw online that he was married to a sturdy, ruddy-faced girl who looked like she could wring the neck of a pheasant with one hand while pouring a martini with the other. I’m sure they are very happy.
As for him and me? It was never meant to be.